Yuchen Zhu

Machine Learning PhD @ Georgia Tech 🍀

prof_pic.jpg

140 Skiles

686 Cherry St NW

Atlanta, GA 30332

Hi, I am Yuchen Zhu, a 3rd year Machine Learning PhD at Georgia Tech.

My interests lie in the broad aspects of GenAI, wich applications in vision, language, and sciences (e.g. single cell genomics, protein sciences, etc). My research currently focuses on diffusion models/flow-based methods (especially discrete diffusion), and multimodal foundation models (such as VLMs, Multimodal LLMs).

At Georgia Tech, I am fortunate to be advised by Molei Tao and Yongxin Chen, and working with a group of incredible researchers. Prior to that, I graduated with MA in Statistics from Yale University and BS in Honors Mathematics with highest honor from NYU Shanghai. During those time, I had the privilege to work with Zhuoran Yang and Mathieu Laurière on theory/numerics of RL and mean-field system.

Contact: yzhu738 [at] gatech [dot] edu


Updates
[08/2025] MDNS is online! Check out our new work on ways to doing RL with masked discrete diffusion!
[06/2025] Mimicking or Reasoning is public! Check out our new work on evaluating MM-ICL for VLM reasoners!
[05/2025] Learning to Stop and Diffuse Everything got accepted to ICML 2025, see you in Vancouver!
[04/2025] I wrote a new blog on how group structures aid generative modeling of manifold data.
[01/2025] TDM and STEM got accepted to ICLR 2025, see you in Singapore!

Talks
[08/2025] MolSS Reading Group
[07/2025] ICML 2025, poster presentation
[11/2024] GT ML Student Seminar
[10/2024] SIAM Mathematics of Data Science 2024 Atlanta, talk and poster presentation
[04/2024] Southeast ACM Student Workshop 2024, student presentation

Selected Publications

(* Equal contribution, Alphabetical order)
  1. arXiv
    MDNS: Masked Diffusion Neural Sampler via Stochastic Optimal Control
    Yuchen Zhu*, Wei Guo*, Jaemoo Choi, Guan-Horng Liu, Yongxin Chen, and Molei Tao
    Preprint, 2025
  2. mimicking-reasoning.png
    Mimicking or Reasoning: Rethinking Multi-Modal In-Context Learning in Vision-Language Models
    Chengyue Huang*, Yuchen Zhu*, Sichen Zhu*, Jingyun Xiao, Moises Andrade, Shivang Chopra, and Zsolt Kira
    Preprint, 2025
  3. diffuse-everything.jpg
    Diffuse Everything: Multimodal Diffusion Models on Arbitrary State Spaces
    Kevin Rojas*, Yuchen Zhu*, Sichen Zhu, Felix Ye, and Molei Tao
    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025
  4. diffusion-gene-expression.png
    Diffusion Generative Modeling for Spatially Resolved Gene Expression Inference from Histology Images
    Sichen Zhu*, Yuchen Zhu*, Molei Tao, and Peng Qiu
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
  5. trivialized-momentum.png
    Trivialized Momentum Facilitates Diffusion Generative Modeling on Lie Groups
    Yuchen Zhu*, Tianrong Chen*, Lingkai Kong, Evangelos Theodorou, and Molei Tao
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025